11. Rennick #2
When my focus drags back to the room, my brows pull tight. Noa doesn’t step out onto the patio like I thought she would. She only leaves the door half open, a clear path out, before returning to my side with deliberate calm.
“You’re letting her go?” My confusion slips out before I can swallow it.
“I’m not her jailer, Ren,” she says softly, but she sounds resolved with this decision.
“I want to help her. More than anything. But if she believes I’m just another person trying to hold her captive, she’ll never trust me.
If she’s ever going to feel safe here, she has to know she can leave.
That she isn’t trapped again in another version of a cage. ”
My jaw locks, straining against the instinctive protest clawing up my throat.
The alpha in me howls that granting Juno this freedom is dangerous.
That the world is still crawling with the same predators who took her and so many others like her.
“How are you sure she won’t just run off and fall right back into the hands of those sick fucks? ”
Noa’s mouth tightens, troubled shadows flickering across her face.
“I’m not,” she admits. The simplicity of her honesty leaves me staggered.
Her gaze drops for the briefest moment then steadies again.
“But I can’t force a Nightingale to want my help.
They have to choose it. I can only hope that somewhere inside Juno, whether it’s the wolf or the woman, she knows I’m here.
That we’re all here. And when she’s ready, she’ll know where to come. ”
Her words unravel me. Again. Every time I think I understand the depth of her heart, she proves me wrong.
She speaks with the kind of conviction that can’t be taught or faked.
I’m fairly certain that her soul is a thing carved purely of compassion.
And to think my careless actions nearly stole that from a world that desperately needs that kind of grace.
That I’d failed to protect such a gift. Shame claws up my throat until it burns.
How she can still stand here and pour herself into others, after everything I’ve put her through, and everything she’s still carrying because of me, is beyond my comprehension.
I follow her out of the room in silence, my chest heavy with the ache of more unspoken apologies.
My wolf paces, torn between the swell of reverence for her and the self-hatred that won’t let me breathe.
I’m so lost inside the haze of it that I nearly miss the sudden chill of her frigid fingers wrapping around my wrist, halting me mid-step.
I look down, startled, to find her already scowling up at me, her delicate features hard with a fire that takes me aback.
“If you ever growl at one of my Nightingales again,” she warns, voice low and lethal, “I’ll kick you in the balls so hard you’ll taste the leather of my boot, Fallamhain.”
The words hit like a gauntlet to the sternum—threat and promise in one. She lets go before I can respond, striding away, leaving me standing with the ghost of her touch lingering on my skin.
My wolf hums his approval, but it’s the sharp ache tightening in my lower body that has me shifting my stance. I bite back a groan, the corners of my mouth curving into a grin I pray she doesn’t turn around and see.
I’m ruined either way, by her tenderness or her fury, and fuck if I don’t crave both.
After leaving Juno’s room, making a plan to check in on her later to see if she stuck around or leaped at freedom the moment it presented itself, Noa and I crossed the house to the conference room, arriving as the first wave of people began to file in.
In all my years, it’s never looked like this, though.
I’ve seen it crowded before, during important council meetings or the occasional tense hearing when one of our wolves pushes the boundaries of our laws too far, but never like this.
Each chair that sits around the long, glass-topped table is claimed.
Fourteen in total, and it still isn’t enough seating.
Bodies line three walls of the room. The air is thick with too many scents crowding into the same space.
Canaan sits at my right, his broad shoulders angled slightly forward, watchful and ready, as he always is.
At my left, is my sweet Noa. Small compared to the crushing weight of competing power in this room, yet she holds herself with a quiet kind of steadiness and draws eyes without trying.
Yrsa Eklund, the sharp-edged Viking-like woman who has never shied from challenging me during these kinds of meetings, takes her usual seat.
Oswin, oldest in the room, keeps his silent post beside her, his vision clouded but his mind as sharp as ever.
Lining the entirety of the back wall are my enforcers.
Their captain, Mercer, stands in the middle of them with his posture rigid and jaw tight.
Many of his men echo his tension. And then there’s Zora, our heeler, who usually escapes this kind of formal assembly with lies and bribes.
But it’s not just members of Pack Fallamhain in attendance.
Amara claimed the seat directly across the table from where I stand at its head.
On either side of her sits a few of her crones, Eldrith and Vardis.
The rest of her coven members line the wall made up of tall windows.
Each of their sharp, knowing eyes miss nothing and there’s an unflappable resolve hovering amongst them.
On the opposite wall, the faction of Craddock wolves that ventured to my territory stands tall, but their faces are lined with the grief that still presses down on them.
Cerys, the purple-haired alpha, who’s stepped forward as a sort of figurehead for the dismantled pack of she-wolves, has taken a reluctant seat at the table.
I’ve already seen the way her gaze flicks to Noa.
She may be wearing the temporary mantle as their leader, but it’s my mate who sets their rhythm.
And Noa, whether out of stubborn refusal or honest blindness, has yet to see that these wolves march to her.
She doesn’t grasp the influence she has, the way people anchor themselves in her steadiness, her gentleness. She doesn’t see the way they lean in, caught in the gravity of her calm. I see it. I see her. And that pride swells until it threatens to split me open.
Introductions went stiffly. Civil words paired with wary looks.
The bulk of the apprehension seemed to stem from the coven’s attendance and came mostly from my enforcers closest to Mercer.
It took nothing more than a flat look from me to smooth their expressions, but the fact I had to do it at all has me filing their faces away. I’ll be keeping them close on my radar.
Because whether or not the Ashvale Coven or the splintered remains of Lowri Pack are official members of my pack, they are residing in my territory. That means they now fall under my protection. And the last thing I will tolerate is infighting within my own land.
Now, we’ve turned to what this new alliance will look like, what our new protection protocols will look like with these new factions joining us.
Amara speaks a kind of authority that doesn’t need to shout to command the room.
“I can put up a ward,” she tells us, a long finger tapping on the glass tabletop.
“Similar to the one I wove around Ashvale, but I’ll never be able reach the far edges of the territory.
Forty thousand acres is far beyond what even my power can sustain.
The best I can do is create a stronghold here, at the heart of your land.
The homes, the pack lodge, the schoolhouse, the little shops.
” Her obsidian eyes cut to me. “I can cover those, but you’ll need to maintain patrols at your borders. ”
Cerys leans forward at this, pointed chin raised. “My pack will take patrol shifts alongside yours, Alpha Fallamhain.”
A scoff splits the room before I can answer her.
It’s quickly covered by a poorly executed fake cough.
Darran, a blond enforcer appointed to his role during my father’s era, smothers his smirk when my eyes settle on him.
When I don’t release him, my unwavering focus a silent invitation disguised as an order for him to continue, he clears his throat thickly and steps forward.
“With all due respect, Alpha,” he says, and already the words reek like insolence, “most of the Craddock she-wolves are omegas. Isn’t that redundant? Sending the very ones being hunted out on patrol.”
I wince inwardly, hating that beneath the enforcer’s dismissive tone lives logic.
I hate even more the way his pale eyes skim past the Craddock she-wolves, as if he’s willfully pretending they’re not in the room with us.
It grates against my nerves and within me, my wolf echoes my sentiments.
He snarls, demanding that we remind Darran of his own place within the hierarchy of the pack.
But before I can interject on her behalf, Cerys, who hasn’t so much as blinked at Darran’s dismissal, speaks.
“Lowri Craddock didn’t waste time by dividing us or limiting what kind of combat training we received based on our designation.
She didn’t coddle omegas or see them as weaker.
She trained us all the same. As fighters. Each of us can hold our own.”
Noa’s small frame shifts at my left. When I slide my eyes to her, her lips are curved into a smug little smile, her eyes bright with satisfaction as she looks to the Craddock she-wolf.
She doesn’t voice her support, doesn’t need to.
Her expression alone tells me she’d stake her life on Cerys’s words.
She doesn’t have to, though.